Tatterdemon

by Vernon, Steve

  Yeah, right.

  He’d never fired his Glock, except on the firing range. He never even had an excuse to draw it. Sometimes he wished something crazy would happen. He wished somebody would start a ball rolling that only he, Earl Toad, could stop.

  A hostage situation or maybe a showdown on Main Street.

  He headed up the road, sloshing inside from the coffee, whistling the theme from “High Noon.”

  He belched a few times.

  Coffee and fruitcake coming back.

  Something else cops did.

  He stared up the road.

  His next stop was Lily Milton’s tiny trailer.

  More boredom.

  More polite talk.

  Maybe more fruitcake.

  After her, Maddy and Vic Harker.

  That might be interesting.

  She’d acted so damn strange the other day.

  Maybe he’d find his excitement yet.

  He pulled the Volvo over to the side of the road.

  It was time to take another pee.

  * 5 *

  Maddy dragged Duane out to the field.

  The earth seemed smooth and waiting.

  Vic stood in the field like a mossy totem pole, close to where she’d buried him.

  Zigger pranced anxiously about his master’s feet, intrigued by the scent of fresh kill.

  “Here,” Vic called out.

  Vic slammed Marvin’s corpse into the dirt, driving him down with the strength of a pile driver.

  The earth seemed to almost help by parting, swallowing the corpse like hungry mud.

  Old Zigger barked blindly.

  “It’s all in the thumb, Maddy. A man wants to farm, he’s got to have a green thumb.”

  “It looks to me like most of you is green, now,” Maddy said, dropping Duane where Vic could get to him.

  This was almost becoming comfortable, her doing just what Vic told her to do.

  It was practice, she guessed. She’d spent so many years listening to Vic. Why should the notion of him dying and being resurrected as a totem-tall scarecrow from the living dead change any of that?

  Vic caught up the other body and slammed it down beside the first.

  The dirt sucked it down just the same as the first.

  “Why didn’t you bring both of them, girl?” he asked. “You might have saved yourself a trip.”

  Which was when Zigger cocked his hind foot and peed on Vic’s left leg stump.

  Bad move.

  Vic snagged the hound’s collar. Zigger yipped once in panic. Just once, before Vic ripped him apart like a soggy paper sack. He did it smoothly, Maddy couldn’t tell if he’d planned it all along, or was just pissed off over being pissed on.

  “All you need is the proper fertilizer,” Vic scattered the hound’s remains about the little patch of dirt. “Blood and bone meal. Good fertilizer. Death makes things grow, hey?”

  He slammed what was left of the carcass into the greedy earth. It swallowed Zigger with a foul popping sound. Then Vic pushed his arm down into the dirt, like it was nothing more than muddy water. Maddy stared spellbound as a soft sunflower glow spread from Vic’s extended arm, warming the earth like rancid summer sunlight.

  “You know Maddy,” Vic said, just as if the two of them were sitting over a couple of cold beers. “Maybe we ought to have a few people over for supper.”

  The earth muttered and rumbled like an angry sea.

  Vic kept talking.

  “Maybe we ought to raise ourselves up a family. Just you and me and a hundred of our own. Hell, maybe even a thousand, hey?”

  The daisies on his chest moved in and out, like they were breathing for him and blowing kisses at her. The daisies in the field swayed in a slow, repulsive harmony. Maddy felt like a balloon, ready to pop.

  Like a held breath, just waiting for the release of a scream.

  And Vic just kept on going on.

  “We need lots of people, Maddy,” he told her, dreamily. “Lots and lots and lots of people.”

  The three poles, one long and mailman blue, one black like Duane’s T-shirt, and a third covered in soft, brown fur, rose like twisted periscopes from the dirt.

  “How d’you like those eggs, Maddy?” Vic cackled. “How’d you like those Easter eggs, hey?”

  Maddy heard someone screaming, loud and shrill as a fire siren. She knew that voice.

  It was her own.

  She screamed like she couldn’t stop. She kept on screaming, like her scream was some kind of a river that might pick her up and float her away.

  “There’s another car coming, Maddy,” Vic said, like he wasn’t paying attention to her screaming at all. “Why don’t you go flag it down?”

  He pushed her.

  Hard.

  She took off running for the road, screaming like a jet-propelled banshee.

  “Maddy!” Vic shouted, finally coming to his senses.

  She ran past the house.

  “Maddy!”

  Past the barn.

  “Maddy!”

  Faster and faster, coasting on the panic swelling within the song of her scream.

  “MADDY!”

  At the last instant, determined to end her unending torment, she screamed her legs forward into one final leap, tumbling beneath the wheels of the oncoming car.

  CHAPTER 25

  Harold and Beulah - Happy at Last

  * 1 *

  Wilfred stood in the station house.

  It wasn’t much like how he’d left it this morning. It looked more like a springtime slaughterhouse. There was blood all around. It looked like some psychotic painter had thrown down a drop cloth and jet sprayed the walls with a couple of gallons of type O negative.

  Shit.

  Where was Wendy Joe?

  He slid his pistol out of the holster, as quiet as he could. He heard the sound of drumming from out of the back cell. It sounded like a goddamn heavy metal Stomp concert. He followed the sound back, reaching his hand out slowly to open the door, which flew open like jack-in-the-box magic just before he touched the knob.

  * 2 *

  Harold and Beulah Urncaster were on their first vacation in twenty-three years of marriage.

  “Roll up the window, honey,” Beulah said. “It’s mussing my hair.”

  Harold didn’t think anything short of a hurricane would muss Beulah’s over-sprayed helmet of crackling blue tresses. Twenty-three years ago Beaulah was beautiful. Now, time and neglect had given her the body of a shapely garden troll.

  He tipped his mechanical larynx up to his throat.

  “I need the air to stay alert.”

  Damned tube, Beulah thought. It made him sound like Donald Duck. Still, the throat cancer had been a blessing. It gave him an excuse to retire from his practice. Had it not been for the cancer, he might still be one of Ottawa’s leading criminal lawyers.

  “Jesus, Harold. Can’t you use a vent?”

  Harold shook his head like an obstinate bulldog.

  “Not the same. Wind in my face gives me fresh air. The vent pipes it through metal, and metal stinks. The window stays open.”

  “Fine,” she replied. “But don’t expect any favors from me, come bedtime.”

  Harold turned his glasses on her. In court his stare was fearsome. His round thick glasses gave him an implacable gaze. His death stare, he liked to call it, but against Beulah, he might as well be blowing kisses. She knew him far too well to be frightened.

  “The only favor you can do for me is to leave me a light to read by. I’ve got a new Grisham I want to get into. I hope the bastard is writing about law, for a change.”

  He loved Beulah, he always would. And on occasion they still managed to rock the window blinds impressively. But the fire of love had banked from a blaze to a slow-burning smolder. It was just as important to lie quietly beside each other, knowing that they’d survived the onslaught of all those years.

  He liked that thought. He smiled a big cheesy ceramic-toothed grin of delight
. He tipped the larynx up as tenderly as he could manage. He did his best to look over his glasses so she could see his eyes.

  The wheels were singing a high humming love song.

  “Damn it, Beulah,” Harold croaked out. “You’re still just as beautiful as a sunrise sailing high over a field full of daisies.”

  As he reached for the power window button to close the draft, Maddy leaped into sight.

  Harold hit the brakes like it was the last thing he’d ever do.

  * 3 *

  Wilfred flew back from the door and bounced on his ass like a ping pong ball. His head cracked against the far wall.

  “Damn.”

  He grabbed for the gun, but he’d dropped it in midflight.

  He tried to get up. His legs folded beneath him. He collapsed like a drunken card table. He lay back, staring dizzily at what stood before him.

  “Goddamn. Clavis?”

  Clavis, or something awfully close.

  It looked like someone had taken Clavis apart and sewed him back up blindfolded, a teetering, country-style Frankenstein monster with nothing but a pair of bloody pants on. The reconstruction was imperfect. Clavis’s hand was sewn to where his left foot ought to be, while his foot dangled like a forgotten hammer from the end of his right arm. He looked a little like an action figure some kid broke and tried to put back together.

  Clavis stepped his left leg forward.

  He grabbed Wilfred by the throat. Then he bent down and punched the policeman with his foot.

  Wilfred rolled his eyes back gratefully, and swam down into unconsciousness.

  * 4 *

  The car screeched to a halt.

  Maddy lay there in the road way, feeling the engine heat looming over her. There was a nugget of gravel imbedded in the left front tire. The gravel was hot to the touch.

  That’s how close it was.

  I’m alive, she thought in amazement as she dragged herself to her feet.

  She had only one chance. Vic was still back in the house and couldn’t move as fast. All she had to do was get into the car and drive away. She leaned across the trunk and rolled along the car, because it was all that was holding her up. She grabbed the front door handle and yanked. There was a florid-faced woman, dressed in a bright flowered shirt. The man at the wheel wore a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. The air bags were both up, nearly smothering the both of them. The woman screamed as Maddy tried to cram herself into the car.

  “Drive!” Maddy shouted.

  It was too late. The man’s window was open. What was left of Marvin reached through the window like a special-delivery nightmare. He tore open the airbag and caught the driver’s head. Then he yanked the head off like a cork from a fizzing bottle. The head made a wet tearing sound as it came loose from the man’s spine.

  Marvin stared at the head, like he didn’t know what to do with it.

  He stuffed it into his mail sack, reached in, and hoisted what was left from the seat and out through the window.

  Damn it.

  Maddy had thought it would take a hell of a lot longer for the new scarecrow monsters to grow.

  The woman kept on screaming what must have been the man’s name.

  “Harold! Harold! Harold!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Maddy swore angrily.

  She was trying to escape. That meant getting out of here.

  She grabbed for the steering wheel, but the woman and the airbag got in her way.

  Zigger jumped through the windshield like a sackful of panic. He growled at Maddy and the woman, not letting either of them touch the steering wheel. Maddy couldn’t tell if the dog could see them, or if he just smelled them. His eyes looked like burning coals.

  Snowman’s eyes.

  Could he see any better dead than alive?

  She reached again for the wheel.

  He kept growling.

  “Easy Zigger. Nice Zigger.”

  The growling was low and slow, like the quiet come-get-bit-some sound a rattlesnake makes on a hot afternoon.

  “Easy Zigger. It’s just momma, is all.”

  She heard footsteps.

  Vic was coming.

  She grabbed for the wheel.

  Zigger caught a mouthful of her work shirt.

  Duane was on the other side of her, a scarecrow in full rot. The straw and the dirt seemed to grow and crumble from off of his sticked-up frame. He reached through the open door and grabbed her legs. For a half heartbeat, she felt like a tug of war rope.

  “There’s no time for sitting around,” she heard Vic say.

  He grabbed the screaming woman and yanked her out of the car like a party favor.

  “Hey bonus. Two for one.”

  He threw the woman to Duane, who tried to catch her.

  Everything about Duane’s scarecrow seemed rotten and rounded off, except for his hands. His hands were as sharp as the knife he’d loved to use. He opened the screaming woman’s throat. She kept trying to scream, her mouth opening up but only blood coming out. From her throat and her mouth, but the worst part of it were his eyes, all goggled wide like a rag doll, trying to make some kind of fucking sense out of this just once before she died.

  Her eyes glassed over, just as crazy, just as confused. Dead before she even knew it. Kind of a blessing, Maddy supposed. She’d have to ask Vic about it.

  “Shift this car into neutral,” Vic ordered. “We’ll shove it over to the side of the road, under them trees there. Dump some hay on it, it’ll blend right in.”

  What the hell could she do? She shifted, and the three scarecrows pushed, and Zigger just sat beside her, growling. She thought about firing the car up and driving away, but the dog would tear her throat our worse than the screaming woman’s.

  For now, she was trapped.

  * 5 *

  In a half hour the car was hidden from the road.

  Marvin proudly showed Vic his trophy.

  “Jesus, did you have to make such a mess?” Vic asked. “Ripping the head off. That’s gross.”

  Take a look in the mirror if you want to see gross, Maddy thought, but she wisely kept her mouth shut.

  “You go check on Lily,” Vic ordered Marvin. “The fat bitch is probably wondering about her mail.”

  Marvin dropped the head into his sack, and shuffled off towards Lily’s trailer.

  Vic turned to Duane.

  “You go get your buddy from the house and drag him out to the field. Maddy, you come with me.”

  He grinned, his teeth all black and yellow.

  “You and me, we got some planting to do.”

  She followed him.

  Staring past him.

  Out to the open field that was waiting like a woman to be loved.

  CHAPTER 26

  Momma’s Got a Wing Wang

  * 1 *

  “You didn’t have to hit him so hard, Momma,” Wendy Joe said.

  The thing that used to be Clavis tried hard to look innocent.

  “How the hell was I supposed to know he was coming in from the other side?”

  “You hit him twice and knocked him out on purpose.”

  “It was nothing I did,” Momma Clavis said. “His head must have been too close to the door. He was probably eavesdropping. Cops like him do that.”

  “Like him? Momma, you do now I’m a cop, don’t you?”

  “You’re a cop’s goodtime girl. Hell you aren’t even that. You’re just his damn housemaid. Don’t you ever forget that, Wendy Joe. He’s a white man, and he’s a cop and you’re nothing but handy candy to that old boy.”

  Momma Clavis eyed Wilfred’s unconscious form.

  “Besides, another body might be handy,” she went on. “This one ain’t exactly the most stylish horse I ever rid on.”

  “Don’t even think about it, Momma.”

  “I’m dead,” Momma Clavis said. “What else I got to do but think? Hell. What’s this collar doing around my neck? You didn’t put me in a preacher’s body, did you?”

  “Clavis is no
preacher,” Wendy Joe answered. “He just thinks he is. Besides, he’s all I had to work with.”

  Momma kept exploring.

  “Hey look, I got a wing wang,” she said, sliding her hands down her pants to check her new-found equipment out. “Damn. This is a teeny weinie. God darn it, Wendy Joe. Couldn’t you at least get me a horse that was hung?”

  “Momma, this ain’t the time.”

  Momma Clavis smiled ruefully.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “It’s been an awful long time. There ain’t no sex in the grave. A girl gets to missing her sugar.”

  Momma Clavis shifted her gaze back to Wilfred.

  “Look at them shoulders,” she said. “I bet you he carries a load of swinging meat. He ain’t black, but he’ll do until black gets back. Mm-mm. Why don’t we put me in his body?”

  “You aren’t using Wilfred, Momma.”

  “Damn shame. I can see what you see in him. He’s all man, even if his hair ain’t naturally curled,” she shrugged. “Take his gun, anyway. It’ll come in handy with the kind of work we got to do.”

  Wendy Joe picked up the pistol from where Wilfred had dropped it, hoping her cooperation might guarantee Wilfred’s safety. The truth was, Momma was dead and being dead meant you didn’t have to follow rules. If Momma took a notion in her head, then Wendy Joe wasn’t sure if she could turn her back.

  Wendy Joe had never held a gun before. Earl had offered to show her a few times, but she’d never taken him up on it.

  “What next?” Wendy Joe asked. “We sure can’t stay here.”

  “Don’t want to,” Momma Clavis said. “We got to get to a church. Folks are dying faster than forest fires. I can hear them screaming all the way from here.”

  Momma Clavis looked up, like what she was seeing was scaring even her.

  “Folks are dying, and not dying, and them that aren’t have got to be the worst of all.”

  * 2 *

  Lily Milton stacked the last of the ice cream cartons in a sticky cardboard tower.